Doc Searls: Patently Absurd?
Pages: 1, 2, 3
Interview Transcript
|
RealAudio -- High Bandwidth or Low Bandwidth MP3 Download 
|
Listen to this interviewPizzo: Thanks for joining us today on this issue. Give us your real quick take on this, because I know you've said, you've written reams on this, and you've decided that it was such an important issue and you knew virtually nothing about it, you went out and educated yourself on it and became what we used to call in the Marine Corps "a latrine lawyer." So why don't you give us your take on this.
Searls: Yeah, patents and trademarks and all that kind of stuff, it's the kind of stuff that always bored my butt off and I've never wanted to pay attention to it. I've attended classes on licensing, and in the open source world licenses mean a lot. You know, there's the GPO and the OGPO and the Mozzilla license and the ESP license, and I just generally ignored that stuff and tried to pay attention to things that I actually care about and where I can have an influence. But it was so interesting to me that when the Amazon patent came down; this is something they applied for years ago. It's not like the distance between the intent and the achievement was really quite large and it was quite clear to me that on the one hand it was a proforma move on Amazon's part and on the other hand it was a very healthy response on the part of the open source community to something that was, that was inherently, somewhere between distracting and actually threatening. And so when I started reading about it and where patents came from, for example, in our country. The very first -- I don't even know what the title was -- but the guy who was in charge of the first version of the patent office was Thomas Jefferson. And Thomas Jefferson had very very ambiguous feelings and thoughts that he articulated about the nature of property and about the nature of intellectual property, or that form of intellectual property that we could patent. And I think in many ways that is embodied in the patent system.
In those days, in the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the material world mattered a lot. Even Marx, who was a great opponent of capitalism, framed his arguments in material terms. But the world we have now is one that values immaterial things, and interestingly it values their abundance and their ability to become abundant. And so on the one hand, we're framing a lot of these arguments about patents in what amounts to material terms that are embedded in the language of patents and the language of the patent office and the language that people use to talk about these things. And it's a box that we tend to stay in when we talk about this stuff. And I think what the hackers did by building the Net was build something that is not a box at all. It is infinite in all directions. On the one hand, if you build a fence across it it's an extreme inconvenience, and on the other hand, it's something you can also route around. I think companies that patent aggressively in the long run are going to be routed around by the customer, and I think they're going to be routed around by the companies that implement the technologies and business practices that are close to whatever those patents are.
| "I think what the Net is for is for all of us, not some of us." |
But, I kind of come at it from two directions. One is I think in the long run that it's going to be resolved by the terms of the people who have the broadest scope of interest, and that is the scope that will be of interest to all of us. But in the meantime, we're going to have a lot of really productive arguments about what are patents for, and they will be framed ultimately I think in what the Net is for, and I think what the Net is for is for all of us, not some of us, and I think what makes it great is that it's something that nobody owns and everybody can use and most critically for the hackers anybody can hack on, anybody can improve it. And that's something that when it's fully mature patents aren't going to run in the credits.
Pizzo: Well, do you think, Doc, that actually it's the other way around, maybe? Just being a devil's advocate for a moment here, I see a lot of similarities between the early aircraft industry, when the Wright brothers and Curtis and those folks were just trying to figure out how to keep that piece of machinery in the air, and it was sort of almost a hobby and then it became a vocation for some people and it really wasn't until, you know, well after the first world war that people started to have commercial thoughts about aviation. And during those early years, everybody shared their knowledge and it was very much like the Net, it was a very open source kind of community. Once commercial applications became clear, then the next phase kicked in and people started to patent pieces of those airplanes and we have the airline industries that we have today because of it. Do you think maybe that's what's going on here, though? Maybe the Net is not as special as we all would like to think it is, that it's just simply another industry that's maturing and moving up to that phase.
Searls: Well, first I don't think the Net is an industry, I think the Net's an environment. I think we're literally building out a new world, that's a second world that's of our own creation, that surrounds the physical world that's familiar to us. It's a social space. It's ours, it's not mine. It gives new powers to me, but it fundamentally is like the air that we breathe. The patent argument inside that is similar, I think in some ways, in trying to patent the ocean or patent the air. You can't, you know. It's absurd in the terms that those contexts present. Now, the aviation example is a good one in a way, but it also, it's also something that operates in three-dimensional space, where we really do need something, some form of regulation to keep things from crashing into each other. I mean just looking at air traffic control and the rest of it. As for patents on stuff with airplanes and so forth, that again is the world of physical property.
You know, quite frankly, I mean I'm going to go step way out here, I happen to think that if we got rid of all intellectual property law, and all copyright law for that matter, and just simply said, "Anybody can do whatever they want, we all inform each other," that's the virtue of being human, you know? If I inform you, you're different. And if you inform me, I'm different than I used to be. This is something that came out in a conversation with Tim O'Reilly and I love it, and it's that we are authors of each other. And the Net creates a space where that can happen, and again I just don't think that's a context where the material notions that are really fairly in peak at this point around patents have a whole lot of relevance except as a kind of sport that people can get into and litigate against each other and the rest of it.
